Ulrike Rose Bach (born 1943) is a video artist from

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

. Rose Bach works with videotapes, installations and performances."Ulrike Rosenbach"
''Dutch Art Institute School For Research.'' Web. 27 October 2014. She was one of the first artists from Germany to use video for experiments with electronic images. Her videotapes critique the traditional representation of women and help formulate the identity of women from a

feminist Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...

perspective.

Biography

Rosenbach was born in 1943 in

Bad Salzdetfurth is a town on the banks of the River Lamme in the district of Hildesheim, in Lower Saxony, Germany. Geography The municipality includes the town itself, and 12 civil parishes (''Ortsteile'') which were incorporated in 1974: * Bodenburg * Brein ...

Hildesheim Hildesheim (; nds, Hilmessen, Hilmssen; la, Hildesia) is a city in Lower Saxony, Germany with 101,693 inhabitants. It is in the district of Hildesheim, about southeast of Hanover on the banks of the Innerste River, a small tributary of the Lei ...

, Germany. She trained as a sculptor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts from 1964 to 1969. Rosenbach began working professionally in 1971 when she created her first video work. She taught feminist art and media art at the

California Institute of the Arts The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) is a private art university in Santa Clarita, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the US created specifically for students of both ...

Valencia, California Valencia is an unincorporated community in northwestern Los Angeles County, California. This area, with major commercial and industrial parks, straddles State Route 126 and the Santa Clara River. Development projects continue to be built in ...

. Rosenbach returned to Germany and founded the School for Creative Feminism in

Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western States of Germany, state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 m ...

. In 1972, she started to use video to document her life. In her films she shows patterns of female identity and strategies of self-determination. Rosenbach also participated in the 1977 and 1987 editions of the exhibition

documenta ''documenta'' is an exhibition of contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. The ''documenta'' was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultura ...

in the city of

Kassel Kassel (; in Germany, spelled Cassel until 1926) is a city on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Regierungsbezirk Kassel and the district of the same name and had 201,048 inhabitants in December 2020 ...

. In 1989 she became a professor of New Media Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Saarbruken, Germany. In July 2007 she retired from the university and began working as a freelance artist in the Cologne-

Bonn The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr r ...

area and in the

Saarland The Saarland (, ; french: Sarre ) is a state of Germany in the south west of the country. With an area of and population of 990,509 in 2018, it is the smallest German state in area apart from the city-states of Berlin, Bremen, and Hamburg, and ...

. Since November 2012 Rosenbach has been the president and the first chairman of the German arts association GEDOK.

Themes

Rosenbach's work has largely been concerned with the depiction of womanhood in art. Having joined the German women’s movement in the late 1960s, she travelled internationally to participate in feminist performance activities in association with the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Beginning to perform ritual actions in 1969, she experimented with using her body as a medium of expression and video as a recording and documenting device. In her work, she probes “the patriarchal basis of art history, its mythological presentations of women, the damage such stereotypes cause to women’s identity and creativity, and the strength of women to constitute the forms of their own visual representations and identity.” Having studied

Buddhism Buddhism ( , ), also known as Buddha Dharma and Dharmavinaya (), is an Indian religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha. It originated in northern India as a -movement in the 5th century BCE, and gra ...

and other esoteric topics, Rosenbach valued intellectual depth and was interested in exploring the psychic and spiritual dimensions of experience.

Awards and recognition

*1977 Prize of North Rhine-Westphalia for young artists *1996 Art Prize of the Saarland *2004 Gabriele Munter Prize *2011 Artists Award of North Rhine-Westphalia *2012 Rhenish art prize for her life's work

References

*"Ulrike Rosenbach". ''Re.act Feminism''. Web. 27 October 2014. *Press release dated 15 October 2011 of the Ministry of Family, Youth, Culture and Sport of North Rhine-Westphalia. *"Home performance for Amazone: Ulrike Rosenbach in Düsseldorf". ''FAZ''. 17 July 2010. Page 35.

External links

Eleven - Verstehen ist wie Hitze
– Video of Rosenbach's artwork from 1985 {{DEFAULTSORT:Rosenbach, Ulrike 1943 births Living people 20th-century German women artists 21st-century German women artists German video artists Kunstakademie Düsseldorf alumni California Institute of the Arts faculty People from Hildesheim (district)